Efficiency also is a measure of economy, as you certainly know. And by reading the forum, it turns out that you are a NASA critics as well, for the same reasons I am.
No, I am a US space politics critic. While there is a lot of things that NASA does wrong (who doesn't?), the biggest problem is what US politicians do to NASA.
And as you can thus conclude: I have different reasons to be critical.
How do I measure it personally? Well, by programs which are not bloated and primarily intended to create and keep jobs while producing blue prints, animations and hardware parts that never fly.
How do you measure bloat? Even for something as simple as software, bloat is not easily detected. A good and a bad space program can start completely identical, use the same processes, but end differently.
If you want to claim that NASA needs tighter controlling, you have my full agreement. If you say that NASA needs tighter control by politics, I would disagree. NASA needs more distance to politics.
When a space project takes ten years to finish, it goes through at least two presidents, multiple senate changes, multiple congress elections... and all want to change the rules completely by which NASA has to play. That can't be good.
Because of that role NASA plays in US politics, it also can't develop proper mechanisms to monitor itself and its own progress. NASA is not accountable to itself, only to others, and the others come and go.
